The Golden House by Salman Rushdie

Author:Salman Rushdie
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

It was as if he were deliberately tantalizing me. This is the world in which he had grown up, that was clearly a part of the message he was sending; but was he admitting to being a participant in that world or explaining his final rejection of it, by leaving it behind him? Or both? He had participated but now he wanted out and that meant going far away, too far for anyone to come after him. Based on what he had said, there was no way to know for certain. Also, relieved as I was not to be confronted with that feared folder containing evidence of my assignations with his wife, I was happy to receive the Don Corleone story as given, drink one more vodka shot, and withdraw. An old man reminiscing about the past; he wasn’t the first such, nor would he be the last. He was beginning to forget the present—little things, where did he put his keys, appointments, birthdays—but he had people to remind him of most of that, and his memory for the past seemed, if anything, to be growing sharper. I suspected—and hoped—there would be more nighttime sessions like the one just completed. I wanted all his stories—needed them, so that, in the end, I could make him up.

The news of impending fatherhood appeared if anything to comfort Nero, underlining, as he seemed to need to underline, the continuing force of his masculinity. And in business that strength seemed, for a time, undiminished, as the immense work being undertaken on the West Side of Manhattan proved to us all. The huge Hudson Yards redevelopment had been undertaken by the Related Companies L.P. and Goldman Sachs in a joint venture with Oxford Properties Group Inc. It proceeded on the basis of a $475 million construction loan obtained by the Related/Oxford joint venture from “various parties.” I’m pretty close to one hundred percent sure that Nero Golden, under this or that company name, was one of the lenders alongside the big boys, Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group and the luxury retailers Coach. His initial investment in the redevelopment of the twenty-six acres had come a number of years earlier, under the EB-5 investment program which allowed immigrants to the United States to invest capital and in return acquire a green card and eventually citizenship. This finally explained to me how Nero and his sons had been able to decamp to America at such short notice and arrive with full rights of work and residence. Subsequently, in the year of Vasilisa’s pregnancy, Golden made a further investment in the form of a mezzanine loan, which was similar to a second mortgage, except that it was secured by the stock of the company that owned the property, as opposed to the real estate. So, theoretically, if the property owner failed to make the interest payments, Nero could have foreclosed on the stock in a matter of a few weeks, and by owning the stock would have gained control of the property.

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